Friday, June 19, 2015

Sidereal clock movements

The Crazy Clock has been out there for a while, and one of the firmware options for it for almost as long has been the Sidereal clock. In looking around the Internet, I've found sort of a background rumble of interest in Sidereal movements for astronomers.

For those who aren't aware, the 86,400 second long "day" we know is more precisely a "tropical" day. It's the amount of time (roughly) it takes for the sun to go from the local meridian (the north-south line passing through the zenith - the highest point it reaches) on one day to return to the meridian on the next day. A sidereal day, on the other hand, is the amount of time it takes a star to go from the meridian on one day to the meridian the next day. The two are not the same amount of time, because at the same time that the earth is rotating on its axis, it is revolving around the sun. Over the course of a tropical year (the time it takes for the Earth to return to the same point in its orbit), the revolution adds an extra rotation. So a sidereal day is 1/365.2425(ish) shorter than a tropical day. That works out to 3 minutes, 56 seconds (that's not exact, but it gets us to inside of the 10ppm tolerance of the clock movement, which is enough).

If you combine a 24 hour clock movement with a sidereal controller, you wind up with a very special clock for astronomers. If you superimpose a star chart for your hemisphere, centered on the pole, the hour hand will always point to the star or constellation passing through the meridian (as long as you set the clock to local apparent sidereal time). It's this property that makes 24 hour sidereal movements valuable for building things like automatic astrolabes.

So for those looking, pre-built, ready-to-use 24 hour sidereal clock movements are available from my Tindie store. Just select the pre-built 24 hour movement with the sidereal firmware. They're in stock now!